Impact of pairing on thermodynamical properties of stellar matter

Abstract

Superfluidity in the crust is a key ingredient for the cooling properties of proto-neutron stars. Investigations on crust superfluidity carried out so far typically assumed that the cluster component was given by a single representative nucleus and did not consider the fact that at finite temperature a wide distribution of nuclei is expected to be populated at a given crust pressure condition. We want to assess the importance of this distribution on the calculation of the heat capacity in the inner crust, in the framework of an extended NSE model. We additionally show that it is very important to consider the temperature evolution of the proton fraction, imposed by the β-equilibrium condition, for a quantitatively reliable estimation of the heat capacity.